Purchased new 26 HP Craftsman DSG 6500 Garden Tractor

[matthew3120]

I hope, very sincerely, that your purchase works out better than that $2500.00 piece of garbage, no good, hunka junk, Crapsman I bought with my hard earned dollars. I could go on, but then my chest will start to hurt, the numbness will creep into my left arm.... you get the picture.

shame on you

 

[heymack]

Congrats on your purchase. Sears/AYP/Electrolux/Husqvarna, etc. must be doing something right considering the millions of units sold and continued strong sales....

 

[Bret4207]

Yes those are the type of replies I love the most. Nothing but a sentence or two of pure brand bashing, with nothing at all posted to back any of the bashing up with. Unless we hear the story, saying something is a piece of junk without a description of the situation is just wasted words.

I think we will all agree none of the Craftsman models are X700's, but they don't have X700 price tags either. I'll venture to guess that unless in the case of the occasional lemon, which you can get with anything, those who have serious ongoing problems with a Craftsman LGT are asking too much from too small a tractor for their job at hand.

-Fordlords-

Happened to be going back through my posts and saw this reply I missed. Since I hate to leave anyone with the idea I just b###h and walk away, I'll fill you in. I bought a Sears/Craftsman 25 HP LGT for around $2500.00. Went the extra bucks for the Kohler engine and figured I'd done well since I grew up with a Sears rider that lasted for decades. I bought it so my kids could help with the lawn mowing, the old Jacobsen was not real safe and the ancient 1965 Wheel Horse Lawn Ranger was small and slow. So the Crapsman came home. Within the first week the repair man was at the house verifying that the tractor wouldn't start because there were pinched wires from the coil and that I need new parts. A week after that the parts arrived and since it was "So far from town" the repair guy asked me to put it all back together. Being a former small engine mechanic and a nice guy, I said sure and put the tractor back together. Strike 1.

With in a month the tractor started backfiring and running poorly. That was traced to a faulty switch which the repair guy also had me install since he was "so busy". Strike 2

The winter went by and spring came along. After fluid changes and greasing what there was to grease the lawn care started. With less than 20 hours on the tractor the PTO clutch unit decided to seek employment elsewhere and disengaged itself from the crank!!!! About $300.00 later I had the parts to replace the broken PTO clutch, whatever Sears calls it anyway. Strike 3.

Not a week went by before the left hand tie rod end gave up the ghost. By now I was done with Sears parts service and fixed it myself. Strike 4.

Now the really fun part started. The tractor suddenly started running on 1 cylinder. Why? Because the push rods in the right head were bent and out of place!!!! Long story short- I took that engine apart at LEAST 2 dozen times fixing the push rods, replacing push rods, retrieving push rods from the base, and finally boring out the rocker shaft, tapping the hold downs bolt holes out to a bigger size and staking the bolts in place. Strike 5-29!!!!!!!!!!

I won't mention the bad starter switches, dead alternator, flat tires, and numerous bearing that the deck went through. Nor will I tell of rotted fuel lines, bad fuel pumps, and stripped bolts found with in the engine. The tractor currently has 112 hours on it and is 3 year old. It has been replaced by 2 1960's Simplicty tractors and the ancient '65 Wheel Horse that just won't die.

OTOH- the left headlight almost always works and the gas gauge mostly works if I remember to tap it 4 or 5 times. Certainly worth what it cost me , eh?

I hope that will satisfy the wise guys who replied to my post so long ago. Craftsman makes GARBAGE!!!!!!!! They are throw away tractors built on low bid and Sears should be ashamed to sell them.

 

[EddieWalker]

Bret,

Thanks for the update. You truly have a horror story to tell about your Craftsman mower!!!!

My FIL is looking at them right now and until I read this, I was feeling pretty comfortable with him buying one. Now I think we'll go back to looking some more.

Eddie

 

[PBinWA]

As I stated before, my five year old GT5000 (25hp Kohler - hydrostatic) is still going strong. I've abused it on my 5 acres and it is still running fine. I think I even went two years between oil changes.

I have driven it over blackberries and scotch broom (basically anything I could drive it over) and it chewed it all up. Before I got my real tractor, I mowed my 5 acres with it. It still gives a pretty good quality cut on my nice lawn (as long as the blades are sharp and the deck is level). It's not as fast or as good as my ZTR at mowing but it cost almost 1/4 of the price. It is great for mowing on hill sides and in the rough areas.

I think all brands and manufacturers have their lemons. It's just a fact of life. I really don't see a huge difference between Craftsman stuff and the entry level Deere, Cub Cadet, or Husqavarna mowers.

 

[Bret4207]

Gentlemen, if I had a choice between a Craftsman and a used Simplicty, Ariens, Gravely, Older Deere or any other heavy duty tractor in the price range of a new Sears, I'd get the used one. If I could find an OLD Sears, like from the late 60's early 70's, one of their Garden tractors, I'd take a good look and maybe go for it. The new stuff just isn't what it used to be.

 

[NEFirewood]

wow first person I heard with a bad experience with a craftsman. Did you get their lawn or garden tractor model?

Make it 2 bad experiences. I documented my experience with a sears unit on here somewhere. Now in all fairness, everything was fixed on the machine and in the end, I did have a functioning tractor, it's just that I felt for the price, I had way too many things go wrong with it. Here's a list of what broke on it after I bought it:

PTO belt broke
Both deck spindles snapped and broke.
Small bracket that stops blades spinning when deck disengages broke off.
Battery died and wouldn't hold a charge.
Engine was hard starting.
Service was good. It wasn't fantastic, but hey it all got fixed.

Where things get aggravating to me is looking out the front door and seeing the lawn growing wild and not being able to do anything about it. I always wondered if perhaps that tractor was dropped off the back of a truck or something, and the frame was knocked out of alignment. I find it hard to believe that so many things could go wrong, but I'll never know. Ultimately my patience wore thin. I paid all this money, and have a machine sitting in a shop and my home beginning to look like the Munster house from lack of maintenance.

I ended up selling it and bought the Cub Cadet that I have now. That worked fine except for snapping 2 PTO belts. Other than that, the Cub has worked fine. By this point in time though, anything that went wrong at all even if it was stupid that I did, was cause for aggravation and fear. But I finally ended the argument/aggravation once and for all over tractors when I bought the Mahindra 2015. Now I have real power, 4 wheel drive for my hills, mowing power, a real front end loader, and best of all, the 3 point hitch on the back.

 

[Superduper]

Hey guys, there are two types of tractors in the Craftsman line: the garden tractors and the lawn tractors. You can tell which is which by whether it has a LT or GT in the model name. Suffice to say that the LT models are very light duty all the way down to the transaxle and the garden tractor models are much heavier duty models. To say simply that you had a craftsman and it was junk is not enough information to trash all the models in the craftsman lineup. After all, if you paid $1500 for it or even $2500, you aren't truly expecting it to perform like a $15,000 X700 are you? Typically speaking, you do get what you pay for.

On the Sears website today, they list 51 yard/lawn tractors and 5 are priced below $1k. There are even 2 priced below $900. You aren't going to get much tractor for $899, no matter what.

For the most part, Craftsman tractors are fairly good value for what they cost and Sears parts support is among the best I have seen. As for battery life, lawn and garden grade batteries are notorious for terrible service life. This is true for virtually any replacement lawn/garden battery. I replaced mine with a full size auto type battery, an Optima from Costco and it has started the tractor for 5 years now with not one supplemental charging, even if it sits for the entire off-season with no use.

Oh yes, my Sears GT (original, no numbers) is 10 years old now and outlasted the Murray lawn tractor it replaced many fold already. I don't doubt that it is not and never will be as reliable as my John Deere but I'm a realist and believe that the tractor has earned it's keep already. I have only used it to mow weed laden fields, often as high as my chest and sometimes very thick. It eats up bottles, cans, tennis balls, small 2x4's and meets an occassional asphalt chunk that gets tossed into the field by passerby's. Yes, it dings the blade edges and makes one heck of a racket when it hits these things but aside from nuisance issues, really has been fairly reliable. I didn't purchase the maintenance and warranty agreements but my neighbor does and they come out every year to service his mower. That means the carb cleanings are on me.

 

[NEFirewood]

The tractor I had was a GT5000, so it was a garden tractor. I don't diss the brand, I just got a real life taste of lemonade. Like I said in an earlier post, I'm willing to bet is was dropped or something, and as long as nothing "looked broken", it was okay to sell. I only say this because I have seen at my local Home Depot (and other stores) that they store these tractors in crates, stacked one on top of the other, sometimes 3-4 tractors high. Also my local Tractor Supply last summer had tractors at 'deep discounts' with broken transaxles and various parts. It was clear that they were dropped, because they didn't have a scratch on them, and the tires didn't even have dust. I just added 1 and 1 in my head and came out with 3, assuming Sears stacked them that way in thier warehouse and I won the jackpot and got the dropped one.

 

[Superduper]

It's true, my tractor arrived in a wooden crate which I had to literally tear apart to unpack. The way the crate was assembled, it may very well have been stacked several high. I have never seen one dropped but I guess that is not out of the question.

I knock on wood, my tractor is still running strong 10 years later. No question though that they do require some upkeep but they are real simple machines so anyone capable of doing some simple maintenance on their cars will have no trouble with these tractors. For the mechanically un-inclined, it might be a different story. I can see then how changing a broken belt could be a headache and a carb cleaning seem like brain surgery.

The major tractor brands do have some great lawn/garden tractors (not from box stores) but they can be priced as high as $15,000. If you've ever seen the parts breakdown and blowup page for one of the craftsman tractors, you know that there truly is a lot of parts necessary to assemble one of these. Given the prices that they sell for, it's amazing they can price them so low. There has to be some shortcuts somewhere to get the price down to that level. The GT5000 should have been a fairly heavy duty machine. I'm suprised that you had the trouble you did. I'm also suprised that you only have 2 spindles on your deck. My GT (no number) has a 3 bladed 46" deck. Pto belts snapping is fairly common, especially if you don't keep the deck meticulously cleaned after each use and if you engage the pto with engine at top speed. The battery issue is, well, due to cheap batteries. The deck spindles breaking and the other deck bracket broken definitely sounds like some form of truama induced breakage whether from operation or as you say, might actually have been caused by dropping the machine.